Booking a trip or requesting other services through mobile applications (apps) is a well-known process that is becoming increasingly more popular. High demand within regional markets has motivated car service companies and other service-related businesses to look for companies that promise apps with a short development-to-market time-line. As a result, such businesses often work with outside software development agencies that sell out-of-the-box solutions, also known as “white label” apps. In today's digital world, white label often refers to a product or software app whose development and branding can be customized according to the particular requirements and branding needs of a reseller.
Conventionally, there have been two approaches to building white label apps. First, a company would maintain its original back-end codebase but change the front-end of the app to give a different appearance which matches or complies with the reseller's branding needs. Second, a company would create a multi-user or multi-tenant app (i.e., where the app instance would remain the same for each tenant, but each tenant would receive its own app with a slightly different set of features). Typically, this multi-user model is used for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) (i.e., a software distribution model in which a third-party provider hosts apps and makes them available to customers over the Internet) and can be more complex to build and maintain. Irrespective of the approach used to develop the white label app, such white label service or dispatching apps often come in packages that include at least an app for service providers and/or an app for customers.
In most cases, white label apps have limited customization. In other words, white label apps tend to include a set of core features that can only be partially customized, such as labelling, color schemes, etc. (i.e., with respect to the front-end of the app). At the same time, white label apps often have a very basic set of features that are optimal for an average app of their type, and therefore, will not suffice for a company requiring complex business logic. On the customer side, it is often inconvenient to download a plurality of different dispatching apps, and/or to download a single dispatching app with access to only one service company having a limited number of service providers (i.e., a driver, home aid, etc.) who may or may not be available or able to meet the user's needs for a particular service request. Even if the customer (i.e., a passenger, a patient, etc.) downloads multiple apps, he/she may need to separately contact multiple service companies through these multiple apps in order to find suitable service. Moreover, a plurality of apps can take up space on smartphones, shorten battery life, and potentially cause confusion for the customer.
It will therefore be appreciated that an improved system and method is needed in the art to address these deficiencies.